The title should say "Josh breaks down every Game of the Year pick EXCEPT FOR 1998 (and regrets every second of it)"

This project was a fucking albatross if I've ever seen an albatross in my life. It took about a week longer than I thought it would and got to the point where I was spending 3 hours of my work day (for about 5 days) on it just trying to get the damn thing done.

Honestly though, while it's neat to look at (check the link to the excel file I've included). I'm still not entirely sure if all this data actually means anything. I was trying to use the editors picks as sort of a public/expert opinion poll in order to say something about the greater population as a whole. And, while I THINK there is something in the numbers that speaks to how diverse RPG's have become (and their migration towards handhelds AND Square Enix losing its strangle holdon the industry) and how that's probably a really good thing, I don't necessarily know if those conclusions are easily drawn from what I ended up putting together. Though I suppose it's "relevant" since it's about that time those in charge of this place churned out another edition of the feature that initially drew me to this site about 10 years ago.

So What's in the Spreed Sheet?

1) A master list of every single Game of the Year Pick ever made on this website (except for the wonky 1998 list), complete with who developed and published said game, as well as what system it can be played on. 831 in total. Yes, this took forever to type out.

2) A console generation by console generation break-down of all of the Picks (5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th). It is my assumption, that the cutoffs between console generations are well established (5th = PSX and Saturn, 6th = DC, 7th = Wii, 8th = WiiU). Things get a little more squirrelly when dealing with handhelds and PC's because the "generations" tend to overlap (and there are none with PC's). I ended up just picking an arbitrary (playstation related) date for when to switch generations with PC's. Making distinctions between generations is important because of stuff like Square leaving Nintendo. Duh.

At the bottom of all the console lists are a running list of all games/developers/publishers who got more than 3 mentions in that particular generation. Because of the varying numbers of editors that made picks each year, these lists are not perfect. I was thinking about making an algorithm similar to the one used by baseball to determine E.R.A so that all games/publishers/developers could be judged on equal footing. Something like number of times picked per 5 picks, would seem appropriate, but I sort of ran out of steam before I got to the part where I ran those kinds of numbers. So take the numbers that do show up with a grain of salt.

3) And this might be the most interesting to some (the editors themselves, maybe), In an attempt to determine if any of RPGFans editors had certain tendencies I separated their picks individually. You had to be around for 3 years in order to qualify (1 is an example, 2 is a coincidence, 3 is a trend... as it were).

Its been more then a few years since squaresoft internally combusted and really it isn't all their fault as much as people just really were not into rpgs back then compared to other genres. It makes me sad to say it since I never liked that game but World of Warcraft and other MMO's is what brought a lot people into RPG genre plus being able to buy the stuff digitally lets more companies survive today.

I really don't like the word Nostalgia I decided, maybe if I was talking about how fun it was playing with ninja turtle action figures when I was a kid and we should play with more action figures now or something lol. But saying thinking about those old games is nostalgia is about as dumb as saying you shouldn't ever take advice/find out about great minds of the past as it has nothing to do with the present. A lot of Great minds transcend time its proven over and over again that people of the past predicted almost exactly where we would be now.

If we would of had "Nostalgia" for our Founding Fathers in America who warned us of all the problems that are happening right now maybe we wouldn't be in such a mess! I feel the same about games if you look to the past you will find all the answers to all the problems we are having now with a lot of games. I will never say we should make games exactly like we did back then but there is a lot to be learned from them of just small things they did that made their games that much more appealing.